Cries for the Unbirth
by Seraphim Grace
Summary: A hunt goes wrong and Dean is left with a lot of alcohol and a book of very dark magic


Title: Cries for the Unbirth

Author: [info]seraphim_grace

Recipient: [info]jetaimerai

Rating: 18.

Pairings: Dean x Castiel

Warnings: Spoilers for Season 4

Adult scenes, Adult situations

Feedback: Always appreciated and replied to.

title from a epigram by Mina Loy,

Silence bleeds

from his slashed wrists

the dim homunculus

within

cries for the unbirth

The walls of the cellar were splattered with blood, and there was a lock of curly brown hair stuck to a gobbet on the wall that was slowly dribbling down the door frame. An hour ago it was a six year old girl. Now it was just meat.

The room smelled of spicy sweet pennies. It lingered on the tongue and clung to the skin like the itchy feel of cheap soap that didn't quite wash away. An hour ago it was called Michaela and it wore a pink denim jumper with a yellow duck on it and a Hannah Montana tee. Her hair was held in twin ponytails with hair ties with pink plastic butterflies. She was missing one of her two front teeth.

Now her teeth were scattered across the floor and made the most awful noise underfoot.

Her grandfather lay against the wall, two shotgun shells in his chest and a silver plated 35mm slug that took out half of his head. Sam had lost it, for the first time in years, he just lost it, something about the blood and meat and brain matter that coated everything and his stomach rebelled leaving Dean to decide what to do with the worst of it. They couldn't just leave it because of the alchemical circle painted unto the floor.

He was going to have to clean this before coating the floor in some kind of turpentine to try and lift it.

It was too dangerous to just leave behind- a blooded alchemic circle for Hell alone knows what.

And outside in the bushes Sam was throwing up.

An hour ago Dean had made the worst mistake of his life and forgot that human beings were often so very much worse than the monsters they hunted. When a vampire tore apart a person it did it to feed. When a spirit destroyed a person it did it because it was driven insane by rage and the inability to understand. When people killed each other they did it for power, even the transitory thrill of a moment over another person.

Michaela's grandfather, Jim, had seemed like such a nice man, he didn't want to believe them. He didn't believe in demons and angels and seals and magic. He was devoted to Michaela, trying to save her from all the horrors of the world.

Dean suspected that's what the circle was for- to protect her.

Instead it had ripped her into pieces smaller than Dean's smallest fingernail and splattered her across the basement like an egg in the microwave.

Later Dean would tease Sam about tossing his cookies but right then he wasn't sure why he hadn't lost it himself. The scene was like something in Hell, except there he'd be wearing the blood from more than mopping it up.

The water in the bucket needed changing again.

It looked like blackcurrant cordial as he tipped the bucket into the mud sink. the movement shifted Jim's alchemic manual in his jacket. That was certainly too dangerous to just leave and too valuable to destroy, Bobby would surely learn something from it.

Its cover said that it was a King James version bible. Jim had cut out the pages and restitched the hard back cover over the book. It looked kind of like the Voynich manuscript except it had been translated into Latin. It was like dynamite.

But even dynamite had uses and Bobby would find one for it. If it had just one piece of information about just one creature that they hadn't had before it was worth stealing.

But even if it explained how to take all supernatural things from the world it wasn't worth the life of one little girl.

She had smiled when Dean knocked at the door, stood them gap toothed and pig tailed and smiled and said "I'll go get grandpa." And she had offered him cookies.

It was a simple mistake.

He never should have been so naive.

***

With the last of the blood and hair and teeth in the mud sink Dean ran his hands through his hair and looked at the symbol on the floor.

Of course it hadn't worked, he thought, it was just plain wrong. The seven pointed star was skewiff and the inner circle was missing.

In his life Dean had seen some truly amazing things done with alchemical circles which were nothing more than spit and duct tape but this one seemed to take the cake. Looking at it and reading the angelic script that outlined it, a side effect of being in hell, he was lucky he had only summoned a demon and not destroyed the entire fabric of the universe.

It was a bad day for anyone when the upside was a six year old girl turned into so much meat.

He emptied the liquor cabinet on his way out, taking a couple of bottles of old herb liqueur and his old friends Jim, Jack and Jose. Then he set a fire in the kitchen on his way out.

***

Jim went down easy with a bucket of chicken. And Jack made the large bag of doritos taste much better.

Sam went off to pray, possibly, or maybe to score. Women were a good way to forget for a while. Of course it wasn't that unusual for Sam to just pray the night through.

Halfway through the doritos he started flicking through the grimoire.

It was written in Latin, where someone had cracked the cipher, and even then he had used simple words, and Jim had made notes all over it in English. This book was seriously dangerous. He was going to suggest that Bobby destroyed it after he pillaged it.

There were pictures of women, fat medieval sketches, in baths of red coloured fluid and how small men, fully formed, would grow out of the mess.

He took a mouthful of Jack and turned the page. This illustration showed a winged being chained to a circle.

Okay, he thought, this was getting interesting. It was a spell to summon and hold an angel, and like most of the circles in the book was based more on a confluence of lines than any magical herbs or spells. It even kinda looked like a devil's trap.

He lay back on the bed, letting the bottle dangle by its back from between his fingers. It might be nice to make that angel see him for once. When he was here he stared and stared and stared but he never saw Dean. He was all about his precious God.

And his precious God had let a six year old girl, a six year old button of a girl, explode into fragments like a squib from a movie.

He looked at the book again, there was a picture of a pile of something that grew into a man and there was an ouroborous inked upon the final illustration.

It was a series of instructions on how to make a homunculus.

Dean had ran across one of those in Tulsa, it hadn't wanted to lay down and die, and then when it finally gave up the ghost it cried for hours, slowly expiring in the simplest alchemic circle Dean had ever seen.

It had cried out for Father.

Maybe it wanted God's help too.

The Jack went down so easy.

Supernatural sons of bitches weren't meant to cry.

Dean had read once, in a gas station movie mag that there was apparently an alternate end of Bladerunner that half the cast remembered but there was no evidence of, in which Deckard said "I sat for six hours and watched him die." Dean understood that from watching that homunculus go.

His Dad had told him to suck it up, that some went easy and some went hard, and that one just wanted to go long.

God obviously didn't care.

It went on for hours.

Castiel was devoted to a God that just didn't care.

Sam was probably in some church praying to a God that never came.

Jack didn't care either, hejust made things simpler.

God was a son of a bitch.

Castiel was an idiot.

Castiel stared and stared. It felt like he was using his eyes to reach in and touch Dean's soul. When Castiel stared it felt like love.

It was addictive.

Jack was a poor substitute and the bottle was nearly empty now. It fell to the floor with a solid thump.

He could bring Castiel here, he could scratch out that shape on the floor and summon Castiel, fix him in one of those accursed circles and make him see.

The first mouthful of Jose always made him gag.

If Castiel could only see what a dick God was, if he could just understand then he wouldn't love God, he'd love Dean and that would be sweet.

Dean would have someone that would never leave, that would love him and see into his soul, see all his strengths and his weaknesses and understand and love him regardless.

If he was trapped in the circle Castiel would never leave, not like Sam, not like Dad, not like Mom.

If he was trapped in the circle Castiel would be his.

He could make the circle into a piece of jewellery and then Castiel would always be with him, trapped and he would only see him.

He would never be alone.

Castiel wouldn't leave him for anything, not for Azazel or Ruby or God.

The bed would never be empty, the nightmares would be bearable, and Jose made the train of thought so easy.

The bottle was nearly empty when he'd started it, but it sat nicely on his stomach.

He wasn't sure exactly when he found himself on his knees scratching the design out on the horrible motel lino with a pen knife. It was a simple design, and then spat into the circle, it was just enough prima materia to start the reaction.

With a devil's trap the devil had to be wooed into the circle. In this Castiel grew over a course of hours as the liquor both fired and sickened Dean. It started like something out of Hellraiser.

It started as bones, then sinew, then meat and finally skin. By that point it was too late to stop it, too late to regret what he had done even though it made him sick to his stomach.

When it was done Castiel sat in the circle staring at him with those ineffable blue eyes, on his chest a black snake swallowed its own tail. And when Castiel saw him he smiled as he said "my beloved."


End file.
